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Reading itself used to be considered a skilled craft. Only 4% of people knew how to read during the middle ages. Mostly clergy and civil servants. The grandp

Reading itself used to be considered a skilled craft. Only 4% of people knew how to read during the middle ages. Mostly clergy and civil servants. The grandparent poster is right imo. If programming becomes just another thing everyone knows, and takes a software class every year like they take an English class, the world will be way better off.

colinb 6y ago
Interesting idea. Will everyone spend the next twenty years complaining about how much they hated Mrs Jones the programming teacher and how Stroustrup ruined programming for them? Put it another way. The reason we interview people the way that we do, is because it isn't realistic (unfortunately) to expect that a CS grad can fizz-buzz, or delete from a linked list, or whatever. Anyone who has spent a little time interviewing can confirm this. Why should we expect that secondary education would do a better job?
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  If they were taught this kind of thing from an extremely young age in school every year these interviews would be trivial, Just like speaking your native language is trivial.
  - dasudasu 6y ago
    We don't quite reach a very high degree of practical math literacy even though everyone is taught from a young age. Calculus considered as "incredibly difficult" being an example.
    - fakedang 6y ago
      I know a lot of students who would not understand the idea behind calculus concepts, even though they knew the formulae. They simply could not grasp a very simple thing like "area under the curve" or "Slope of a curve". This was at a large private school with a selective admissions process. I know for a fact that my college educated parents (50+) would not know how to solve a calculus problem. So yeah, Calculus is a pretty bad example because it IS incredibly difficult for the general population.
      - nickthemagicman 6y ago
        I don't know if this is like a smarts thing or just a poor math education thing.
        6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
        As someone who does math for a living, I’m always frustrated because I truly believe it’s a poor math education thing. But then people just respond, “oh MYNAME, you just think that because you’re good at it/you’re a math person.” As if that made the point less valid rather than more valid.
    - nickthemagicman 6y ago
      I completely agree with you. I think it's a failure of the school system from a very early age because math is heavily dependent on foundations of previous classes. And I think it's more than just sharing the information we have to also make rational thinking fields as fun and cool as the emotional expression fields of study like English or Music and not the domain of 'nerds'. I think our whole culture would be way better off if people had better critical thinking logic and math skills.
      - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
        > because math is heavily dependent on foundations of previous classes. This is a point I hadn't thought enough about before. Great insight. It makes me think that maybe we just suck at education in general, and it only shows up in the subjects where continuation is dependent on previous courses. If you completely fail to understand american history, you can lie to yourself about being good at it, and continue to believe that when you get to european history. If you completely fail to understand the lessons from Fahrenheit 451, you can believe you're good at English (the subject, not the language) while you move on to Shakespeare. The only (pre-college) subjects I can think of that really require you to actually understand the prereq's material are math and language. And they share that people say "I'm just not a math person" or "I'm just no good at languages." I'd never thought about it with that lens before, but now I'm feeling kinda pessimistic. Like, if this hypothesis is true, it's not about bringing math education up to the bar of other subjects, it's about overhauling the entire system.
    - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
      Leonardo da Vinci was likely one of the most intelligent humans ever to have lived, and didn't understand calculus. It wasn't for lack of interest, either! He was fascinated with parachutes, timing falling objects and trying to understand the rates of change. But despite nibbling at the edges of calculus, he never got there. In contrast, it's now completely ordinary for a teenager to not only get to the core ideas but solve complex calculations with them in timed tests!
      - nickthemagicman 6y ago
        This is an odd comparison. I think DaVinci was way before Newton. High school students aren't asked to invent calculus just to understand it. I didn't invent djikstras graph traversal algorithm but I can read and understand it. I think there's a difference between original invention and understanding 'n usage.
        AlchemistCamp 6y ago
        We all stand on the shoulders of giants and have increasingly powerful complimentary cognitive artifacts that let us easily do things that used to be very difficult. In a more extreme version, consider that ancient Greek and Roman mathematicians struggled with long division problems that many of us can do in our heads now! Why? Arabic numerals are far more effective than Roman numerals for the task and after having learned them, we have a permanently increased ability to do certain kinds of calculation.
        nickthemagicman 6y ago
        That's very fascinating. I look at quicksort and that was revolutionary at the time. Do we have ways to better conceptualize the world around us? Or are our brains evolving outside of some normal evolutionary process? Fascinating to me.
        AlchemistCamp 6y ago
        I think both are true but mostly the first. Human evolution has sped up dramatically in the past 15,000 years, but it's still very slow. Arabic numerals, literacy, maps, bayesian reasoning, etc are unnatural, but better ways to conceptualize the world around us and these tools and others have steadily become more prevalent throughout the population. Maybe quicksort hasn't permated through much of society, but binary search has! People born 100 years ago became comfortable flipping through phone books and quickly finding a name, whereas that would have taken a conceptual leap for most born 200 years ago.
  - isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
    You use your native language all the day, all the time. It's nowhere near the same.
fauigerzigerk 6y ago
The important difference between programming and reading/writing is that written language is just another representation of natural language. All the complexity is in understanding and using natural language. Reading itself is trivial once you have some practice. Programming on the other hand is creating new abstractions (i.e modelling). It never becomes trivial, because it's not just a new encoding of existing abstractions. I think programming is no different than maths. Yes, everyone will have to know a little bit of it, but very few will be capable of modelling complex problems or implementing large software systems.
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  Language is just a tool to express a collection of ideas. The reason programming is not an extension of our natural language is because we haven't included those concepts in our natural language yet. The world would be way better off if everyone had better logic and analytical thinking ability
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  By saying " ed few can do the hard stuff", is that not redefining use of maths to an arbitrary cutoff line. Think of all the instances of maths used globally. Do the millions of people who more or less get the idea of an average - this is used across politics, and common discourse. Does that count as maths? I would say yes, just as a for loop is programming. No we are not expecting a compiler but just "arranging the world so it can be easily iterated over" is a fine common objective.
  - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
    >Does that count as maths? Yes, that's exactly what I meant when I said "a little bit of it".
- jart 6y ago
  Well lots of people can read and write, but few people are able to write a good novel. Everyone I know who isn't necessarily a software engineer but has basic programming skills has benefited from that knowledge. For example with everyday office work there's a big difference between someone who's able to use Word and someone who's able to use Access. The latter requires programming know-how. Also shell scripts and automation. It has a huge productivity amplifying impact.
maxwell 6y ago
Agreed. Widespread ability to read and write natural language seems to've, eventually, made written constitutions not so-much "viable" but "necessary". It's easy to forget how innovative the U.S. Constitution was for being written, content aside. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_constitutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_constitutions Definitely excited about the social implications of widespread ability to read and write executable language in the long run, note when France crossed 50% literacy though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#/media/File:Illiteracy_france.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#/media/File:Illiterac...
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
I think I am the grandparent - and yes I agree, software is going to be table stakes for the next generation of corporate players (and by implication, those corporates who cannot will mean a huge gap opening up). It's not just "can my employees write a for loop" but it's "do we store data sensibly, when upper management wants a report is there a data history stretching back to the raw (ie no manual involvement). Do we all publish APIs and work through those defined interfaces - and many more.

colinb 6y ago

Interesting idea. Will everyone spend the next twenty years complaining about how much they hated Mrs Jones the programming teacher and how Stroustrup ruined programming for them? Put it another way. The reason we interview people the way that we do, is because it isn't realistic (unfortunately) to expect that a CS grad can fizz-buzz, or delete from a linked list, or whatever. Anyone who has spent a little time interviewing can confirm this. Why should we expect that secondary education would do a better job?

nickthemagicman 6y ago
If they were taught this kind of thing from an extremely young age in school every year these interviews would be trivial, Just like speaking your native language is trivial.
- dasudasu 6y ago
  We don't quite reach a very high degree of practical math literacy even though everyone is taught from a young age. Calculus considered as "incredibly difficult" being an example.
  - fakedang 6y ago
    I know a lot of students who would not understand the idea behind calculus concepts, even though they knew the formulae. They simply could not grasp a very simple thing like "area under the curve" or "Slope of a curve". This was at a large private school with a selective admissions process. I know for a fact that my college educated parents (50+) would not know how to solve a calculus problem. So yeah, Calculus is a pretty bad example because it IS incredibly difficult for the general population.
    - nickthemagicman 6y ago
      I don't know if this is like a smarts thing or just a poor math education thing.
      - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
        As someone who does math for a living, I’m always frustrated because I truly believe it’s a poor math education thing. But then people just respond, “oh MYNAME, you just think that because you’re good at it/you’re a math person.” As if that made the point less valid rather than more valid.
  - nickthemagicman 6y ago
    I completely agree with you. I think it's a failure of the school system from a very early age because math is heavily dependent on foundations of previous classes. And I think it's more than just sharing the information we have to also make rational thinking fields as fun and cool as the emotional expression fields of study like English or Music and not the domain of 'nerds'. I think our whole culture would be way better off if people had better critical thinking logic and math skills.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
      > because math is heavily dependent on foundations of previous classes. This is a point I hadn't thought enough about before. Great insight. It makes me think that maybe we just suck at education in general, and it only shows up in the subjects where continuation is dependent on previous courses. If you completely fail to understand american history, you can lie to yourself about being good at it, and continue to believe that when you get to european history. If you completely fail to understand the lessons from Fahrenheit 451, you can believe you're good at English (the subject, not the language) while you move on to Shakespeare. The only (pre-college) subjects I can think of that really require you to actually understand the prereq's material are math and language. And they share that people say "I'm just not a math person" or "I'm just no good at languages." I'd never thought about it with that lens before, but now I'm feeling kinda pessimistic. Like, if this hypothesis is true, it's not about bringing math education up to the bar of other subjects, it's about overhauling the entire system.
  - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
    Leonardo da Vinci was likely one of the most intelligent humans ever to have lived, and didn't understand calculus. It wasn't for lack of interest, either! He was fascinated with parachutes, timing falling objects and trying to understand the rates of change. But despite nibbling at the edges of calculus, he never got there. In contrast, it's now completely ordinary for a teenager to not only get to the core ideas but solve complex calculations with them in timed tests!
    - nickthemagicman 6y ago
      This is an odd comparison. I think DaVinci was way before Newton. High school students aren't asked to invent calculus just to understand it. I didn't invent djikstras graph traversal algorithm but I can read and understand it. I think there's a difference between original invention and understanding 'n usage.
      - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
        We all stand on the shoulders of giants and have increasingly powerful complimentary cognitive artifacts that let us easily do things that used to be very difficult. In a more extreme version, consider that ancient Greek and Roman mathematicians struggled with long division problems that many of us can do in our heads now! Why? Arabic numerals are far more effective than Roman numerals for the task and after having learned them, we have a permanently increased ability to do certain kinds of calculation.
        nickthemagicman 6y ago
        That's very fascinating. I look at quicksort and that was revolutionary at the time. Do we have ways to better conceptualize the world around us? Or are our brains evolving outside of some normal evolutionary process? Fascinating to me.
        AlchemistCamp 6y ago
        I think both are true but mostly the first. Human evolution has sped up dramatically in the past 15,000 years, but it's still very slow. Arabic numerals, literacy, maps, bayesian reasoning, etc are unnatural, but better ways to conceptualize the world around us and these tools and others have steadily become more prevalent throughout the population. Maybe quicksort hasn't permated through much of society, but binary search has! People born 100 years ago became comfortable flipping through phone books and quickly finding a name, whereas that would have taken a conceptual leap for most born 200 years ago.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
  You use your native language all the day, all the time. It's nowhere near the same.

fauigerzigerk 6y ago

The important difference between programming and reading/writing is that written language is just another representation of natural language. All the complexity is in understanding and using natural language. Reading itself is trivial once you have some practice. Programming on the other hand is creating new abstractions (i.e modelling). It never becomes trivial, because it's not just a new encoding of existing abstractions. I think programming is no different than maths. Yes, everyone will have to know a little bit of it, but very few will be capable of modelling complex problems or implementing large software systems.

nickthemagicman 6y ago
Language is just a tool to express a collection of ideas. The reason programming is not an extension of our natural language is because we haven't included those concepts in our natural language yet. The world would be way better off if everyone had better logic and analytical thinking ability
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
By saying " ed few can do the hard stuff", is that not redefining use of maths to an arbitrary cutoff line. Think of all the instances of maths used globally. Do the millions of people who more or less get the idea of an average - this is used across politics, and common discourse. Does that count as maths? I would say yes, just as a for loop is programming. No we are not expecting a compiler but just "arranging the world so it can be easily iterated over" is a fine common objective.
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  >Does that count as maths? Yes, that's exactly what I meant when I said "a little bit of it".
jart 6y ago
Well lots of people can read and write, but few people are able to write a good novel. Everyone I know who isn't necessarily a software engineer but has basic programming skills has benefited from that knowledge. For example with everyday office work there's a big difference between someone who's able to use Word and someone who's able to use Access. The latter requires programming know-how. Also shell scripts and automation. It has a huge productivity amplifying impact.

maxwell 6y ago

Agreed. Widespread ability to read and write natural language seems to've, eventually, made written constitutions not so-much "viable" but "necessary". It's easy to forget how innovative the U.S. Constitution was for being written, content aside. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_constitutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_constitutions Definitely excited about the social implications of widespread ability to read and write executable language in the long run, note when France crossed 50% literacy though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#/media/File:Illiteracy_france.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#/media/File:Illiterac...

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

I think I am the grandparent - and yes I agree, software is going to be table stakes for the next generation of corporate players (and by implication, those corporates who cannot will mean a huge gap opening up). It's not just "can my employees write a for loop" but it's "do we store data sensibly, when upper management wants a report is there a data history stretching back to the raw (ie no manual involvement). Do we all publish APIs and work through those defined interfaces - and many more.